


A Good Burn

by Origamidragons



Series: Still Flying 'verse [3]
Category: Firefly, Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Firefly Verse, Assassin Castiel, Gen, Mercenaries, POV Castiel, Space Pirates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-15
Updated: 2016-04-15
Packaged: 2018-06-02 11:04:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6563752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Origamidragons/pseuds/Origamidragons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Operatives didn't ask questions, didn't doubt, didn't see shades of grey. They followed orders because that was all they could do. Their lives didn't belong to them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Good Burn

"CAS! Any time now would be great!" Dean shouted, his voice echoing over the speakers, and Cas immediately sent Baby into a steep dive. Dean and Meg were back-to-back with guns in their hands and furrowed brows, ringed by a circle of the gangsters they'd been robbing. Sam, he knew, was still inside, working his magic on the safe while Dean and Meg provided a distraction.

At least, that had been the idea. Now, it looked like the plan would have to be tweaked. This constant improvisation was something Cas still hadn't adjusted to, though he'd been getting better. As an Operative, jobs were always planned down to the last minute with no room for error, not that there ever was any. Because if you so much as doubted, you were gone.

And Cas had heard about the Stanford Academy program and he had doubted. A place where the brightest of the bright were snuffed out like so many candles, ripped apart and sewn back together over and over and over again.

'For the greater good,' his superior, Zachariah, had said with a sickly-sweet smile. 'Some have to suffer so we can bring peace to the universe. Don't you want paradise, Castiel?'

And Castiel had said 'yes' and what he meant was 'not like this' and he ran. He thought of his old superior, Anael, and how she had just disappeared one day. He wondered if she had found out what was happening and run too.

(Anael is Anna now, a red-headed church girl with no past and no future but as a farmer living quietly and peacefully on an out-of-the-way planet called Milton.)

He yanked the yoke up and pulled up just in time to avoid a messy collision with the ground, forcing the thugs to scatter as he touched down. Just as they broke formation, Sam (and he must have been watching, either with his eyes or with his mind) came sprinting out of the bolt hole with something small and shiny in his hands and all three of them leapt into the cargo bay as Cas lowered the door and he pulled back up before it was even closed.

Shots rang out behind them and metal music sounded as they bounced off Baby's hull. Cas was already anticipating the hours that Dean would spend looking for dents and holes. Sure enough, he could already hear the captain faintly complaining as the three battered smugglers stumbled up towards the bridge. Meg was laughing breathlessly, and she took a gulp of some sort of alcohol and then offered him the bottle.

"Nice moves, flyboy," she said with the same teasing cynical sarcasm that imbued every word she said. "You're an angel."

Meg was fascinating to Cas, because she was his antithesis. Operatives didn't ask questions, didn't doubt, didn't see shades of grey. They followed orders because that was all they could do. Their lives didn't belong to them, but to the Alliance, who they served loyally until death and that was just how it was. In return, they lived in luxury, high above the normal citizens, with the best care and food and servants. They weren't allowed to have alcohol. Nothing that would compromise their performance.

But then there were people like Meg, like Dean, who lived in dirt and squalor on the edge of space and stole and killed for a living, who ran and ran from the Alliance and from their pasts every waking moment and drank too much and broke every law and were fiercely, painfully free, and at some point Cas had become one of them and now he wouldn't have it any other way.

He brought the bottle to his lips by the neck and drank, and it burned his throat on the way down.


End file.
